New York SBDC Research Network

From MarketingProfs : Search engines keep getting smarter, but that doesn't mean SEO is no longer necessary. Your business will lose out to competitors if you're not working to keep it in the public eye. Although all SEO hinges on great content and a responsive website, local SEO has its own practices and requirements that influence how you rank locally. There are literally hundreds of local SEO ranking factors to consider, but what I've detailed here are five of the most important. 1. Create a targeted landing page for each location

Like a prehistoric masterpiece scratched into the far recesses of an undiscovered cave, it doesn’t matter how awe-inspiring your website is if nobody can find it. Search engines are the archeologists of the digital landscape. An estimated 90 percent of consumers searching for local businesses online use search engines like Google® Bing® and Yahoo® to find them. If you want your business website to get discovered, you need to tap into the power of search. Just about every website owner today understands the basic concept of search engine optimization (SEO): taking steps to attract the attention of search engines in order to drive traffic to your site. Search Engine Land defines SEO as “the process of getting traffic from the ‘free,’ ‘organic,’ ‘editorial,’ or ‘natural’ search results on search engines.” The paid ads you often see at the top of search results don’t figure in. You’ve likely already taken the fundamental steps to improve your SEO. Your website brims with unique and com

In today’s age of ubiquitous connectivity, many small businesses have implemented a variety of online marketing efforts to attract new customers and increase overall sales. Unfortunately, results can vary significantly because tools are only as good as the expertise of the person using them. The lure of the “next big thing” can create online marketing inefficiencies when small business owners try to be a marketing “jack of all trades and master to none”. For example, the rapid growth and adoption of the social web can be overwhelming for small business marketers. Consider these social network growth statistics: Google sites handle about 100 billion searches each month (SEL) YouTube hosts nearly 14 billion videos (comScore) Facebook is now over 1 billion users (Mark Zuckerberg) Google+ has over 500 million users (Google) Twitter has over 550 million accounts (Statistics Brain) LinkedIn is at 225 million users (LinkedIn) Pinterest grew 4,377% in 20

Your online presence is a vital part of any sales strategy. But is your website the sales powerhouse it should be? Replicating the effectiveness of the face-to-face sales process online -- and getting customers to go from clicking to buying -- can be difficult. The good news is that there are a few simple tricks and tweaks that can improve your site's revenue-generating capabilities. Here are five tips that can help turn a business website into a sales machine: 1. Build an effective shopping cart. Some small businesses use services such as PayPal for making and receiving online payments. But building a full-featured shopping cart directly into your website might be a better option. Shopping carts allow for more customization and the potential to provide more product information. (Check our our earlier post on setting up a PayPal account for your business here .) Austin, Texas-based Volusion is an all-in-one shopping-cart tool that starts at $19 per month and handles chec

The JM Internet Group, a leader in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) training online, is proud to announce that the 2012 edition of their SEO Fitness Workbook - a leading book on Search Engine Optimization - is available free of charge as a review copy up to April 1, 2012. The new SEO book charts how to get a company or organization to the top of Google and Bing step-by-step and includes access to the SEO Toolbook, a compendium of over 100 amazing free search engine optimization tools for small business. More HERE .

Grader.com offers a "family of tools that helps measure all that matters in inbound marketing." Read "inbound marketing" as the Internet, social media and blogs. And they are all free. Website Grader is a tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website or blog and provides recommendations for improvement. Press Release Grader evaluates press releases and provides a marketing effectiveness score. Twitter Grader measures one's Twitter profile. (Last I checked, the NYS SBDC Twitter feed had a score of 87 out of 100.) These are all services of Hubspot.com , an Internet marketing company that also offers a website redesign kit gratis, as well as some useful seminars. Oh, and Are You Using Your Business Cards to Socialize? ; i.e., to use social networks. It's All About Networking.